Who Receives Your Awakening?

Your phone lights up.

A few words appear on the screen, and something inside you changes. Your chest tightens. You reread the message. A reply begins forming before you have decided whether to answer. Five minutes earlier, the afternoon belonged to you. Now your attention circles another person’s words.

Or perhaps the message is the one you wanted. Affection. Admiration. An invitation. Your body softens. Suddenly the same afternoon feels full of possibility.

Watch this closely. Someone miles away has touched a screen, and your inner world has rearranged itself around the result.

Anthony de Mello made this ordinary captivity difficult to ignore. The Indian Jesuit priest, whose teachings on awareness continue to unsettle readers, asked us to examine how much of our lives consists of reactions we mistake for choices. His work also drew institutional opposition: in June 1998, eleven years after his death, the Vatican issued a notification identifying positions in his writings as incompatible with Catholic faith. The controversy can distract from the encounter his teaching makes possible. You begin reading about awakening and discover, with some discomfort, how often you would settle for having your wishes fulfilled.

You want the message answered. The reputation restored. The uncertainty removed. You want the circumstances that disturb you to cooperate.

And there is a spiritual version of the same bargain. You want meditation to quiet you, prayer to reassure you, and God to make your life feel unmistakably guided. You are prepared to surrender, provided surrender delivers what you hoped control would deliver.

Here The Godward Way finds a question worth staying with:

What happens to your turning when you receive no reassurance?

There may be more to learn from that moment than from an hour of beautiful peace.

Consider the contracts we carry without ever writing them down. I can rest when this person understands me. I can be generous when I feel secure. I can trust when the future becomes visible. Each contract places something at the center of our attention and requires life to orbit it.

The object may be a person, a success, a fear, or an injury. It may even be an experience we call spiritual. Whatever occupies that center begins organizing the rest. We interpret events according to whether they bring us closer to it. We recruit other people to protect it. We call the resulting struggle our life.

Awareness exposes the arrangement. A longing can be seen as longing. A fear can be recognized without every argument it makes becoming a command. For a moment, there is room around the reaction.

That room matters. Grief has a real object. Betrayal can require a decisive response. Bodies hurt, and people can do terrible things to one another. Seeing clearly helps us distinguish what has happened from the additional demands, predictions, and identities gathering around it. It allows us to meet the wound with greater honesty.

The Buddha’s teaching on craving offers a powerful account of how this additional bondage forms: desire fastens onto experience, demands satisfaction, and renews suffering through its grip. The first discourse describes release through the relinquishment of that craving. The Godward Way can learn from this diagnosis while keeping its own destination in view. Its central concern is the orientation of consciousness toward the Creator.

An attachment has loosened. Attention is available.

To whom is it offered?

There is a temptation to make the newly discovered observer our final refuge. We have spent years being pushed around by thoughts and feelings; now we find that we can witness them. The relief can be immense. An angry thought appears, and we can notice it. Shame rises, and something remains capable of seeing.

In The Godward Way, we sometimes call this observing consciousness the Big Eye. The name points toward an intimate capacity: the recognition of what is happening within us while it is happening.

But the mind is quick. Give it the words “observing consciousness,” and it may construct a serene figure somewhere behind the forehead. Give it “higher soul,” and it may produce an elevated version of the personality, watching ordinary life from a safe distance.

That imagined watcher is another appearance within consciousness. It too can be caught and offered.

The practice asks for a delicate honesty. We do not need to picture the one who sees. We do not need to establish ourselves in a magnificent spiritual identity. Even the satisfaction of thinking “I have become someone who is awake” belongs among the things we can offer.

Otherwise, the hunger for admiration has merely found a quieter audience.

A similar temptation appears when we turn toward God. The mind wants an object. It wants a face, a presence with recognizable qualities, a warmth it can summon, a convincing answer to the question of whether anyone is there.

It can manufacture these things with extraordinary tenderness. An imagined Father may seem more loving than anyone we have known. An inner light may arrive with tears. A silence may feel vast enough to contain the world.

Receive the experience as experience. Let the tenderness be tender. Let the tears come.

And offer them.

Within The Godward Way, whatever appears to consciousness remains part of the offering. An image of God, a feeling of divine closeness, a sentence that seems to explain everything: each can be received without being installed as the Creator Himself.

This discipline has deep relatives. Maimonides insists that God has neither bodily form nor the characteristics that belong to bodies. The Qur’an declares that nothing is comparable to Him. The Christian mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius carries the seeker beyond the reach of names and concepts. These traditions have their own commitments and disagreements. Their companionship here lies in the restraint they ask of the human imagination.

The Godward Way makes that restraint part of the offering itself. Even our most cherished account of God can be held with open hands.

“Father,” “Source,” and “Creator” give language to our address. They cannot contain the One addressed. The word Godward names a direction of intention beyond anything we can place before the mind. It supplies no coordinates, no spiritual picture to maintain.

You can turn without enclosing the recipient of your turning.

That is what makes the movement so vulnerable. There is nothing to grasp as proof that you are doing it correctly.

Simone Weil understood prayer through the orientation of attention toward God. In her writing, attention involves a patient availability, a suspension of the impulse to fill every opening with our own conclusions. Her insight touches something essential here: we can remain receptive without forcing an encounter into the shape we expected.

Imagine sitting quietly and discovering that you are waiting for a feeling.

You had thought you were praying. Now you notice the concealed demand: let something happen so I know this is real. Let peace arrive. Let an answer come. Let the world give me a sign.

There is fear underneath the demand. Perhaps fear of being forgotten. Perhaps fear that you have invented everything. Perhaps the ache of wanting to be received.

You do not have to punish yourself for finding it. That ache is precisely what is here to offer.

Catch and Offer.

The phrase can sound like two instructions laid end to end. In practice, the recognition and the Godward intention belong together. You recognize the fear while remaining turned toward the Father. The fear is allowed to be present within that orientation.

There is no need to devote yourself to studying it until it becomes the most important thing in the room. There is no requirement to resolve it before the offering becomes acceptable. Consciousness can acknowledge its trembling without making the trembling its center of gravity.

A simple inward address may help:

Father, receive this too.

The words can fall away. Their work is to give expression to a direction that does not depend on repeating them.

This is why peace cannot serve as the final measure of the practice. Peace is welcome. A quieter body and a less troubled mind are gifts worth receiving. But the moment we require them, the old contract returns: I will continue turning toward You as long as turning makes me feel better.

Then anxiety begins to look like failure. An uncomfortable day becomes evidence that we have lost our way. We find ourselves anxiously supervising our own serenity.

Catch that supervision too. Offer the wish to be certain, the impatience to improve, the shame of still having ordinary reactions after all our spiritual insight.

There is great tenderness in discovering that nothing needs to be concealed from the offering.

The Bhagavad Gita gives this movement an expansive expression when Krishna instructs Arjuna to offer his actions, his food, his gifts, and his austerities to him. The ordinary activities of a life can become acts of dedication. Its devotional setting differs from The Godward Way’s refusal to make any perceived form the final object of orientation. Yet the invitation to offer an entire life reaches across that difference.

There is a related movement in the prayer of Jesus, a Jewish teacher addressing Jewish disciples. Within the Jewish scriptural world of Matthew’s Gospel, he teaches the prayer: “Thy will be done.” Notice how few guarantees those words provide.

They leave the future open. They place the one praying in a posture of receptivity. Spoken seriously, they touch the very place where we would prefer to negotiate.

We may want to add an explanation: Your will, provided it resembles the future I can bear. Your will, provided I understand why. Your will, provided nobody misunderstands me.

And the prayer quietly receives another offering: our need to write the terms.

This reaches into our relationships with uncomfortable precision.

Someone withdraws, and immediately we want them to restore our sense of being loved. Someone becomes upset, and their distress begins governing our attention. We may comply, argue, reassure, disappear, or make promises we cannot sustain. Beneath the different responses lies the same question: what must I do to stop feeling this?

De Mello’s challenge to attachment is valuable here. It invites us to look closely at the claim we have placed upon another person’s existence.

But we need care in how we use that insight. “I need nobody” can become its own proud defense. Human beings form bonds. We miss one another. We depend on care in countless real ways. Love includes the vulnerability of being affected.

The Godward question concerns what governs us within that vulnerability. Have I made your response responsible for confirming my worth? Am I listening to you, or listening only for reassurance? Can I allow you an existence that exceeds the role my fear has assigned you?

When the fear of losing someone appears, it can be caught within the same Godward orientation as the love. There is no need to amputate the longing to prove freedom.

Gradually, the person may become easier to see. Their wishes, limits, contradictions, and freedom can emerge from behind the task we gave them. We may remain close. We may discover that a boundary is necessary. We may have to bear being misunderstood.

None of those outcomes can substitute for discernment. A feeling of certainty deserves the same honest attention as any other feeling; calling it divine does not place it beyond examination. Our intensity cannot tell us, by itself, what God wills.

This matters because offering emotion leaves us responsible for what we do. Anger can be offered without every angry impulse being obeyed. Another person’s disappointment can be acknowledged without being granted authority over our direction. A difficult conversation may remain difficult after we have prayed.

The offering does not always remove the difficulty. Sometimes it changes how we carry it.

Picture the evening after such a conversation.

You are washing a cup. The words return. You imagine a better reply, then another. You feel the old urgency to explain yourself until no one can possibly mistake your intentions.

You notice the urgency while turned Godward.

Water runs over your hands. The conversation remains unfinished. There is still an ache in your chest. The cup needs rinsing.

All of it can belong within the offering: the water, the ache, the wish to be understood, the ordinary movement of your hands. You do not have to leave your life to find a suitable spiritual moment.

Nor do you have to narrate each movement until the practice becomes another exhausting commentary. A brief recognition may be enough. The body can soften. Attention can remain open. Life can continue.

There will be days when you forget. You may spend hours revolving around someone’s silence or your own imagined future. When recognition returns, even the disappointment at having forgotten is available to offer.

What a relief to stop treating the soul as a project that must be completed before it can be presented.

Awareness gives us a chance to see the many claims upon our attention. The Godward Way asks us to live that seeing as an offering toward the unknowable Father. Its freedom grows through the willingness to bring what is actually here, including what we wish had already disappeared.

Tomorrow your phone will light up again.

Perhaps the message will please you. Perhaps it will hurt. There may be a familiar tightening, a sudden hope, a sentence composing itself in your head.

You may notice.

And within that noticing, you can turn Godward—before you have secured an answer, before you have become calm, before you have worked out what this moment means.

The part of you still trembling can be offered too.

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Three questions to carry into the practice:

• What reassurance have you quietly made a condition of your willingness to turn Godward?
• Can the wish to become spiritually free itself become an attachment?
• What changes when your fear of losing the connection becomes part of the offering?